Mahler’s Seventh Symphony was the one work given by the Berlin Philharmonic within the first of their two Proms, a riveting efficiency below Kirill Petrenko, for whom, one suspects, this most enigmatic of the composer’s symphonies holds appreciable significance. In 2018, a yr earlier than he took up his submit in Berlin, he performed it along with his earlier orchestra, the Bayerische Staatsoper, each in Munich and in London, and his reside recording (made in the course of the Munich performances), was extensively considered one thing of a benchmark that subjected the work to a revelatory re-evaluation. This Proms efficiency bolstered his popularity as one of many symphony’s excellent interpreters in a live performance of startling brilliance.
Petrenko is splendidly alert to the truth that ambiguity of expression is prime to the work’s influence. No different Mahler symphony calls for fairly such painstaking consideration to instrumental and textural element in music that appears to withstand which means and hovers in ambivalent territory between dream and nightmare, phantasm and actuality. A way of impending fragmentation or dissolution underlies it, and it’s no marvel that some – together with Schoenberg, who adored it – noticed it as marking the start of musical modernism. Two nocturnes flanking a spectral scherzo-cum-waltz kind the work’s kernel, their sinister magic beautifully captured right here in taking part in of nice readability, with a lustre of tone within the strings, astonishing brass and slithering woodwind solos that have been totally beguiling, however past which additionally lurked a way of disquiet and dread.
The outer actions have been equally compelling. The primary hinted at neurosis with its repeated ideas into woodwind shrillness, which offset the lyricism of the second topic and that sudden, extraordinary passage of stillness on the motion’s centre, through which time appears briefly to face nonetheless. The garish gentle of day ostensibly sweeps away the terrors and fantasies of evening within the finale, executed with astonishing virtuosity and brilliance.
But even right here, we have been reminded that vestiges of unease lurk behind its jolting shifts in temper and color, and that Mahler retains the work’s ambiguities proper to the top. A surprising efficiency, each second of it.
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